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I think they have and them some. Weren't some platforms literally giving away titles for free to pull away customers? I don't pay that close attention because I rarely play games (especially modern games) anymore.
I think your worldview is just plainly wrong. It reminds me of friends who complain about how modern clothes are shitty and don't last but don't buy solid durable clothing. I buy unbranded quality clothes or lightly used well established brands and my clothes last yeaes. They buy trash for the namebrand or because it's cheap and then get mad as if they didn't choose to make that trade off. With basically any product you have a million choices (exceptions were already stared, mainly in government backed monopolies or high barrier to entry markets). I can't really take the "Products are getting enshitified!" meme seriously when I can literally just go on google and find you an equivalent product for basically anything you ask for. Assuming you're in America, that is.
You really seem to buy into the "corporations only look at the next quarterly report" meme way too much. Amazon and google were not profitable for like a decade because they just kept reinventing their revenue. There are some cases where investors punish long term thinking (recently Intel) but I would say it's really not the norm, at least in growth industries.
Yes, I in fact have downloaded and played several of the games Epic gave away.
The storefront they have is simply not a serious enough draw where, given the choice to buy a game on Steam vs. Epic, to really go for Epic instead.
And Steam has not taken a single action that has made me feel mistreated or punished for loyalty. Its their game to lose, as the user numbers tend to show.
EDIT: I hopped on Epic Games to see what free games they were offering. They have Rogue Waters, a pirate roguelike game that looks right up my alley! Epic Game store shows it has a 4.1/5 star rating. Not bad.
But I hop over to Steam and I can IMMEDIATELY see that it has "mostly negative" recent reviews, which indicates a possible problem! I read one recent one and it says:
That is EXTREMELY relevant information, and if it weren't literally free, I'd probably not buy it based on that review... which Epic wouldn't have shown me.
STEAM IS JUST THE INHERENTLY MORE CONSUMER-FRIENDLY PLATFORM.
WHAT IS STOPPING EPIC FROM IMPLEMENTING THE SAME SYSTEMS?
/edit.
Love to hear that! If I can improve my worldview its a benefit to me.
Not convinced, though, since this model of things has been extremely predictive of corporate behavior and has actually shaped my own behavior as a consumer to try and 'reward' those companies that actually maintain a standard of NOT treating consumers like cattle.
I'm mostly focused on products where they've managed to achieve the 'efficient frontier' on exactly how little quality they can produce such that the average consumer no longer notices or cares, whilst maintaining a similar price point as they've had all along.
Its been done with movies, with cars (although there are of course luxury brands if you DEMAND quality!), with food, and its ubiquitous with tech.
Shrinkflation is a known tactic used here as well.
I mostly blame the fact that people have very short memories so even if they notice that the quality of something is kind of poor, they won't realize that anything has been lost since they can't remember the before times. And they won't readily recall the poor quality when it comes time to buy new.
Me, I have an extremely sticky memory. I hold grudges, I remember details about people's behavior at critical moments, I remember when government official did things that betrayed their constituents. So I'm just particularly sensitive to the tactics at work in the corporate world.. But on the flip side, if a company (Valve) consistently treats me 'well' I am happy to reward them with loyalty.
...
Who was the primary owner of Amazon shares for the duration of that unprofitable period?
Do yah think the fact that the original founder maintained centralized control for the majority of the company's lifespan might have helped its overall approach to long-term investment? Is that possible?
This is precisely and exactly my argument.
Amazon is, however, an example of an enshittified corporation by now. At least their website is. Lots of knockoff products with relatively poor quality control, and the search is less functional, the return policies are less friendly. The review system is manipulated, both by the site and by scammers. I accept this may be due to customer abuse, of course.
I have not had a Prime membership for about two years because They introduced ads into the 'free' tier of Prime Video. Yes. I am that petty. Their logistical empire remains unmatched, I do admit.
Steam has of course never done that to me. The search function works marvelously, they give you a great review system to judge the quality of products, and has the nicest refund policy in the business.
Google is arguably a true pioneer of the enshittification process, which DOES leverage its nigh-monopoly status to engage in anti-consumer practices.
Again, if you have a specific metric that we can apply that might capture the phenomena, I'm happy to examine and discuss it.
Do you have any examples offhand of a company that was becoming horribly mismanaged and driven into the ground that managed to make a massive turnaround WITHOUT it being taken private by interested parties?
But that's my entire point.
Using cars as an example of decline in quality is quite insane. Do you know what sort of advancements in technology cars have made and how little it would cost to make a car from 1990 with modern techniques? I mean, you can kind of seeing it in Russia or China where they sell cars that aren't fit for foreign markets for 10k or so (albeit their production techniques aren't modern, so it's not quite equivalent) but...jeeze...this is a really bad example. I'm really not going to go into detail on all the automotive progress made in just the past 15 years, but it's been massive. You can argue that cars are too expensive because of regulation and have a very good point, but that's not the same thing at all.
You're making cost savings sound like some nefarious act. Companies want to lower costs to compete in markets. This is not nefarious.
You're changing your argument. Before you said privately owned corporations have an advantage in that they don't have to be profit maximizing (to which I noted, neither do publicly traded corporations) and now you're saying because Bezos owned a large portion (not sure if he was the majority owner or not, but I actually don't think he was) it doesn't count.
Again, if it's shit you can just go to another platform, like you apparently did. I frankly haven't noticed any drop off. In fact, their Amazon knockoff brand is a huge upgrade over a lot of the stuff they sold 15+ years ago when I started using the site.
But again, what's your point? If a corporation does a bad job there are literally a million other options. You're acting like people are getting screwed when they willingly go to Amazon and buy things over their competitors (because Amazon has a massively better product tbh) and furthermore your google point just seems like bullshit to me. Have you tried to use a non-google search Engine? Duckduckgo is absolute trash. So is Bing. Google is the best without question excluding maybe using a good AI to aggregate information for you.
I can't say there are many companies that return from being driven into the ground at all tbh. Most companies do one thing well, reap the reward, can't change when that thing is no longer as profitable as it once was, and then die. That's kind of how the system is supposed to work. I'm really not sure how that's relevant to the idea that companies are just manipulating people into buying shitty products.
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